You Need To Listen: Former Tennessee Governor’s Cure For What Ails America

Many business people aspire to public office. Bill Haslam, the former two-term Tennessee governor and a scion of one of the largest privately owned businesses in the United States, made it happen, and he said he feels his private sector career helped make him a more effective political leader.

Speaking with Willy Walker this week on the Walker Webcast, Haslam said the years he spent helping run Pilot Corp., a $20B business founded by his father, allowed him to “know what ‘excellent’ looks like.”

“I think one of the advantages to being part of businesses that compete on a national scale is you compete against some really good people,” Haslam said. “You realize, OK, if we're gonna win, I'm gonna have to recruit people of this caliber, and I'm gonna have to have a strategy that really adds value to my customer.”

Haslam said that his business background also made him comfortable with the arcana of budgeting, a skill that was useful when he proposed offering two free years of community college or technical school to Tennessee residents, a move no other state had made.

“It gave me the courage to try to do some innovative things,” he said. “To say, ‘Maybe we can figure out how to make the math work on that.’”

But Haslam, a Republican and devout Christian, told Walker that business leaders as well as politicians need to possess something else: a sense of humility. 

An early mentor of his, the late Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, once advised him that when working with people who hold other viewpoints, “You have to begin by sitting down and saying, ‘OK, the other person might be right, and I need to listen to them.’”

Since leaving political office in 2019, Haslam has been dedicated to trying to forge understanding and consensus among people with different points of view, whether through his work with Vanderbilt University’s Project on Unity and American Democracy or in his book “Faithful Presence,” which explores the role of faith in his politics. 

Haslam said his faith definitely plays a role in his thinking, but not to the point where he disregards other people’s experiences and points of view. He acknowledged that keeping an open mind is difficult for many people in today’s world of partisan news sources and noisy social media.

“There's no room for nuance in today's political conversation,” he said. “And, as anybody who's run anything knows, nuance is needed, because things are never quite as black and white as they seem from the outside.”

Unfortunately, he said, too many Americans behave as if the world is monochromatic and that those who disagree with them are simply beyond the pale. As a result, many people will support a candidate who shares their political agenda but who clearly doesn't share their moral values.

Haslam said he saw a recent survey of Republican primary voters that asked what values they look for in a presidential candidate. Of about 20 options, “Christian” was at the top of their list while “humble” was at the very bottom. 

“I would argue this is a case where somebody hasn't really thought through the theology of their politics,” he said, adding that in a successful democracy, “the goal is not to win the argument. The goal is to get to the right answer.”

The megaphone of social media has amplified disagreements, making the stakes in every argument seem very high, he said, and making otherwise ethical people embrace the teachings of Machiavelli over Christ's from the Sermon on the Mount.

“Too many of us are getting our identity through our politics,” Haslam said. “We need to both be more involved in politics, and we need to care a little less about it too. The other side is not the enemy. The other side just has different opinions than you do.”

The next Walker Webcast will be July 20 with guest Peter Linneman, principal of Linneman Associates. Register here.

This article was produced in collaboration between Studio B and Walker & Dunlop. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

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